Library clips

Don’t know about the name, seems a bit familiar, anyway Diggol is in the realm of Findory, Spotback and Rojo…based on your click behaviour it learns your tastes and delivers personalised news, at the same time your interactivity adds to the community page.

It’s in alpha at the moment, so I see this service developing into something special, as I’m already impressed.

The great thing about Diggol is that you can enter your OPML, just like at TailRank, Findory, and megite…and that’s not all it has is common with these memetrackers.

Discovered Topics (Word Bursts)

What I like about it is that your news stream is organised by topic, must be something similar to how Zoom Clouds works…Rojo has a great relevancy feature, but imagine reading Rojo based on word burst topics (well now you can, just plug in your Rojo OPML into ZoomClouds or even PersonalBee to try…actually plug it into Diggol).

At the moment in Diggol, each item has word burst topics, or you can view the word burst list (discovered topics) on the sidebar…these are based on your OPML (this would look could in a cloud view).

What Diggol doesn’t have is a tag cloud derived by user tags from the feeds in your OPML…I guess if you imported your OPML or your Rojo RSS into SuprGlu or MySyndicaat, this would be a way to read your subscriptions by user topics, or for each item discover other items by clicking on an author tag.
I posted on this a while ago…reading your feed set by wordbursts or user tags.

In respect to what I call word bursts (discovered topics), I’ve been told it does more than simple keyword extraction…from an email by the developer (Ping):

“We do a lot of heavy lifting natural language processing, perform part-of-speech analysis, measure the informativeness of the words and phrase to make sure the extracted Topics carry enough meaning for a user to decide what to pursue…

In addition, our Topics are not ranked by how many times they appear like the tag clouds do. Instead, they are ranked by importance, measured by what posts they are in, how important that feed is, how many users read posts containing this topic, how much the individual user (after login) is interested in this topic (from his past reading behavior of similar topics), among other things.”

More from the FAQ:

“The list of topics after a post shows the clusters of posts that cover same or similar concepts. They also serve as auto-tags of the post.”

Related Posts (Memetracker)

This notion of discovered topics is the idea of a memetracker, but not quite the same

…so perhaps it really is a personalised reader crossed with a memetracker, the difference being it also includes clicking behaviour (this is the personalised reader part), and it shows all posts from your OPML (whereas TailRank and megite only show some posts from your OPML whilst recommending posts)…Diggol keeps recommended posts in a different section.

I’ve just noticed that some items have “Related Items”…so now it really is developing into a Memetracker
…so now you can find similar stuff via “Discovered Topics” and related stuff via “Related items”.

One thing it doesn’t do as of yet is have a section for aggregated outgoing links from all posts, like Chuquet…actually Rojo once had this feature in a section called Recommended Links (use CTRL-F to find it).

Also another thing I’ve mentioned before is threading…if a read or unread post in my RSS Reader has a hyperlink in the body of the post that is the same as the hyperlink in the post I’m reading, then thread them together.
ie. if a post I haven’t read yet has the same link in the body of the post as the post I’m currently reading, thread it, then I can click on this unread post and read it now.

Relevance

Besides the tracking your reading behaviour eg. clicks, comments, voting, tags…there is a whole lot more going on…again from my email correspondence with Ping:

“Before login, the posts are ranked based on several factors: the authority of their feeds, the topics they cover, how the topics are related to and reinforced by other topics (an iterative process, much like the google pagerank, but uses topic relations instead of hyperlinks), users’ collective interaction with the feeds and similar or related topics in the past…

After a user logs in, the user’s own past interaction (time decayed) with the feeds and similar or related topics in the past are weighted much higher in ranking the posts…”

Back to it…

Import your OPML, or choose a category from the Diggol feed set, choose them all if you want the whole Diggol feed set.

It seems you can even organise your feed set into categories…some people have their subscriptions already organised into folders, maybe this is something that could be done when you import your OPML.

You can even filter keywords in your feedset, these are called My Topics (sometimes known as “smart feeds”).

You can also make your Diggol public/private/share just with friends.

So lets get this right:

My Feeds - your OPML (this appears in the My Topics section)
Categories - organising your OPML (I think?)
My Topics - filtered keywords in your OPML
Discovered Topics - wordbursts…from your OPML
My Tags - items you have saved
Related items - memetracker feature (clustering)

I really like how you can view the items from aspects of the attention data…
My Tags/Comments
Already Read
Commented
Real-time Recommendations

Then at the community level:
Hot Topics
Hot Tags
Most Voted
Most Read
Top Voters/Taggers
Public version
- Social aggregation (all your attention data is aggregated for the community version)
NOTE: What I mean by attention data is your OPML and how you read it.
I wonder if they will promote some users accounts, I’d like to see peoples OPML’s through the Diggol attention filter.

More…
Topic map
Trend graph
Search

NOTE: my OPML didn’t comply with the template for importing so I got some help…here it is.

RSS Reading

Read by river of news
- My feeds
- Categories you created
- My Topics

Read by feed
- but you have to click on the feeds name under the title of a post
…I’d like this listed on the sidebar, with a mark read/unread feature (Traditional RSS Reader)

Each post

Discovered Topics
Categories
Tag
Comment
Email
Vote
Related posts

What I’m seeing here is a tool that combines the best features of Digg, Zoom Clouds, Findory, Spotback, Rojo, TailRank, and Megite (both at the personal and public level).

In the end to use Diggol, I’m going to have to give up Rojo, and I just can’t do that, I need to keep track of what I have and haven’t read (mark read/unread)…plus I like having a subscription list in the left pane.

I like the idea of TailRank and Megite as they seem complementary to Rojo, whereas the personalised reading behaviour readers like Findory, Spotback, and Diggol are more of an alternative…again including a read/unread feature would make it a very competitive alternative.

Although I can one day see Rojo having a different view in addtion to date, and relevancy, and that is “meme”…basically incorporating a memetracker view.
eg. view just a selection of posts from your OPML, with recommended post thrown in to the mix.

And of course for each item, showing related items (from the blogosphere or just from your OPML, or from your contacts OPML)…this could also be a feature in the date and relevancy view.

While I’m at it, bring back the aggregated outgoing links section…and as mentioned before, view posts by wordbursts, author tags, and the beloved threading feature.

Congratulations to Diggol for incorporating so many attention features into one service.

Byoms in a nutshell seems to be searching via IM.

Add a search engine or a site to your contacts list, and all you do is select the contact you want to search, and go for it…the results are IM’d back

Only works with AOL, what about Google Talk…Google is the search king.

Is this just a tiny bit more convenient than using the a toolbar, eg. the Copernic toolbar lets you add heaps of search engines, just choose one and search.

I guess the convenience of IM is that you don’t need the browser…this is where the Google Deskbar comes in, can’t you just add a search engine to the Google deskbar and search without having to use the browser.

NOTE: this is now only available with the Google Desktop Search package…check out the Google Deskbar group for the hacked up replacement.

NOTE: I added Google Blog Search has an option in my Google Deskbar
eg. This is how I added it http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q={1}

Like TechCrunch say, it’s like the functionality of searching multiple site at once like Rollyo but within your IM client…not bad at all…plus the mobile search feature. I guess these two points give it the edge.

[ADDED: On the same topic how do I go about making a site search for my blog for the Google Deskbar
ie. put in a search term and select Google Blog Search for Library clips…blogurl:http://libraryclips.blogsome.com.

I dont know where to put the q={1}…it has to go somwhere in this URL:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=blogurl%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Flibraryclips.blogsome.com&btnG=Search+Blogs

I’m trying to come up with a way to allow people to print my blog posts.

My first idea was RSS2PDF, but this is no go as each of my posts don’t have an RSS feed (who does anyway).

My second idea was HTML2PDF, but I can’t get this to work for my blog (some java error)…but the problem is the service put a big banner across the PDF which makes some of the post unreadable.
The other problem is that it prints the HTML of the blog post, not the feed, therefore you get the sidebar and all the frills…if I have a 2 line post, and you print it out, it will print out pages and pages because of the sidebar content.

Then I noticed Feedshow (a public version of a web-based RSS Reader)…you can view all posts from one feed, here’s my blog.

If you notice next to each post there is a printer icon, clicking this will show just the body content for that post, nice and clean, exactly what I want…here’s a sample of a print version of a post.

Now how do I use Feedshow as a 3rd party service to get this functionality on my blog?

On each blog post I want the printer icon, clicking on this will launch to the print version of the blog post (via Feedshow).

Whether it’s Feedshow or another service I think there is value in this feature…there are lots of blogs out there, and it is terrible to print out blog posts.
The service could provide code for blog platforms to put in their post templates, then for every blog post you have a printable version.

I guess like every other web 2.0 service the money is in the ads
eg. imagine if Feedshow gave everyone the ability to print their blog posts via Feedshow, every time you click on the print version on one of my blog posts, it goes to a landing page served up by Feedshow (with tempting ads).
Now I have a lot of posts in my blog…now there are lots of blogs in the blogosphere with lots of posts…if all blogs were Feedshow enabled to print blog posts, then any one who prints out a blog post will see an advertisement, there’s money in that.

This is just another landing page idea…Feedburner and Feedpass do it for feeds, why not for printing.

All these ideas and no techie know-how.

[ADDED 29/12/06: MySyndicaat and xFruits have a print a post]

A little while back I mentioned that I found the SharpReader notifier, and ScoopScanner notifier handy, a pop-up for each new item is essential (at least for some feeds), since Rojo doesn’t have this I use Rasasa (RSS to IM)…this kind of does a similar thing to a systems tray pop-up.

Another choice is to use a 3rd party system tray pop-up…on my to-do list are AlertBear and Touchstone…

One I did try today was newsplorer…it docks in your systems tray/taskbar, when you click it a widget appears, this is an RSS Reader.
You can even categorise your subscriptions…plus there is OPML import, even Bloglines import…plus right-click to del.icio.us).

In the preferences you will see it also has a pop-up notification feature, so now I guess I can try one of these 3 RSS alert services with my Rojo OPML (well my OPML Workstation version of a portion of my Rojo OPML, as my Rojo OPML is broken)…anyway I can see how this taskbar pop-up compares to my IM alerts.
What I like about my IM alerts are they don’t fade away, I have to close the window, this way if I’m away from my computer I won’t miss it.

ChatCreator is a very easy to use private chat tool.

To create a chat just enter a name for that chat and hit go, then send the chat URL to a friend, once you are both viewing this URL you can chat.

This seems more disposal than Conversate, but much easier to get a chat started as you don’t need to register.

I guess the chat is permanent and you continue later on as the URL is unique and isn’t going anywhere…now how to add this to the footer of my blog posts.

At the moment if someone reads my blog posts and they want synchronus communication, they can click on the Gabbly icon to chat to others on the Gabbly page of my post, or they can click the 3bubbles link, but they are limited to chatting to others who have done the same.
Actually, Gabbly will work quite easily, just like you email or IM a friend the ChatCreator URL you created, just send them the Gabbly URL for the post, or send them the post and get them to hit the Gabbly bookmarklet.

NOTE: For others not familiar with Gabbly, for any URL just put “gabbly.com” at the start of the URL, and a chat box will appear for the URL, or click the Gabbly bookmarklet to chat about the page you are on.
If anyone else has done the same you can chat, otherwise email or IM your friend and tell them do to what you did and you can chat.
Same goes with 3bubbles, just send your friend the blog post URL and get them to click the 3bubbles icon on the footer of the blog post…the advantage with Gabbly is that you don’t need the blog owner to have the icon on the footer you can launch the chat box yourself.

So it seems Gabbly is just as easy as using ChatCreator to instantly chat about a blog post, only ChatCreator is more private (invitation based)
I’ve also got the conversate icon on each blog post footer for people to private chat about a blog post, it is more cumbersome, but still effective.

Now for 3spots to work some magic so I can footerise this chat.

Here’s an example of using Gabbly, see who else is on Gabbly for the Google homepage URL
http://gabbly.com/www.google.com
If no-one is there but you want to chat about Google in general to a friend give them the URL, or tell them to go to the Google homepage and prepend it with gabbly.com/